


within the chamber of stars

by meritmut



Series: force bond interludes [2]
Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Angst, Canon Compliant, F/M, Force Bond (Star Wars), Late Night Conversations, Post-Canon, Touch-Starved, Unresolved Emotional Tension
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-20
Updated: 2019-05-20
Packaged: 2020-03-08 06:42:24
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,156
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18889246
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/meritmut/pseuds/meritmut
Summary: Surrounded by space, stars and stars and more stars. Cold bleeding into her bones. The only other soul in this sea of constellations is watching her silently.





	within the chamber of stars

**Author's Note:**

> of stars and thought, all alone, silent they watch; in this chamber is where all life lingers  
> crowned by scars and dreams, all within the chamber of stars  
> one hand holds my throat, the other holds my heart  
> equilibrium  
> only now is forever  
> — ne obliviscaris, 'within the chamber of stars'

Waking, or dreaming, or something in between; flight, or falling, leaving behind her body and going somewhere else, or becoming something else; stepping out of her skin yet feeling more keenly than ever her own beginnings and endings, the only thing holding her together her awareness of herself, her self, of which parts of  _ them  _ are still  _ her _ .

She drifts in darkness, limbs outstretched, her fingers marking silvery trails through cosmic waters. Above her an unfamiliar firmament unfurls in sable hemispheres, an infinite expanse emblazoned with a trillion points of light, each one distant beyond imagining and yet close enough to touch. 

Surrounded by space, stars and stars and more stars. Cold bleeding into her bones. The only other soul in this sea of constellations is watching her silently.

Sitting upright puts her back to him. Eyes burn into the unprotected skin between her shoulders but Rey takes her own sweet time in surveying her surroundings, putting off the inevitable for as long as she can.

Her memories know this place. She was here, not so very long ago, although she remembers it differently—she remembers most clearly the  _ red _ that covered everything, the garish arterial shade that made the room resemble nothing so much as an enormous organ, the chamber of some gargantuan creature’s heart. It’s gone now, burnt away to bare the charred bones beneath that rise into a rounded vault over her head, steel ribs holding together the colossal viewports which are all that stand between Rey and the void beyond.

It’s too little, too much  _ nothing _ to hold back the weight of the sky.

Every breath sounds unnaturally loud in this cavernous space, deepening the impression that she’s trapped inside some great slumbering beast.

That somewhere between sleeping and waking she was swallowed whole, doomed to wait in the dark until her air runs out.

In the dark, alone with Ben Solo and the cold grey stars.

If this is victory, she would hate to see defeat.

His eyes are ringed in bruise-like shadows, his scar indistinguishable from the lines of exhaustion and sadness etched deeply into his face. He looks like he hasn’t slept a night through in weeks.

Maybe he hasn’t. Maybe Supreme Leaders don’t have the time for something as mundane as rest.

He regards her in silence when she stands, gloved fingertips stroking the chair’s armrests and she should feel exposed, even  _ vulnerable, _ in the loose vest and shorts she wears to bed; warm Nyssene nights have lost their novelty but none of their discomfort after a lifetime in the frigid desert and she probably would have been sleeping naked by now if she trusted the Force to not make her regret it, but the longer she looks into Ben’s eyes the more she begins to wonder if he can see her at all.

(Those dreams might be the worst.)

The quiet worms its way under her skin.

Finally—

“Are you here?”

Sometimes, in the life before, Rey would go for such long periods of time without catching sight of her own reflection that she would begin to forget it. Go unseen for long enough and we become invisible: go without seeing and we cease to exist at all; the materiality of the body is tangled inextricably with perception, with  _ knowing  _ and  _ being known _ , if no one sees us then what distinguishes us from ghosts? It’s nonsense to believe that bodies exist only to be looked at and no one is more aware of her body’s capacity for endurance than Rey, but it’s easy to forget when weeks have passed since we last saw our own faces that we exist outside ourselves, that we are more than the base mechanisms of muscle and bone that keep us alive.

Her face is spectral in the polished stone beneath her feet. In the nearest viewport, she is visible only as a distorted shimmer in the air. Rey spreads her hands at her sides as if to say,  _ you tell me _ .

“As much as it matters.”

“It matters. You aren’t, always.”

The breath hitches in her chest.

Rey knows he dreams of her. She dreams of him more often than not.

To hear him speak of it is another matter entirely.

“I almost believe it’s you, sometimes,” Ben goes on, but his gaze is far away and it seems to Rey that his words are meant not for her so much as for a memory of her, the shade of a girl who once stood in this very spot. “Even when you don’t look at me. I tell myself you can’t, that you aren’t alone and if you were you would answer. Or that you’re angry. It’s easier, to believe that you’d just...rather not see me.” Pain, vivid and stark, streaks across his face. “But sometimes...sometimes you’re not there.”

Behind closed eyes, in the safety of the dark, Rey strangles the surge of compassion his words impel and meets his candour with her own.

“It’s what you chose,” she reminds him as steadily as she can; pointing the finger will always be easier than looking our own guilt in the eye. It’s a far better feeling to accuse, to take the knot of self-blame that sits like bad meat in her stomach and cast it at another’s feet and say  _ you, you did this, you are the one at fault. _

You have made us both alone again.

It’s not good, but it’s better, and this—Rey’s coming to learn—is about as good as it gets when pride and bruised hearts are at stake.

“You look like shit.” She tries to sound matter-of-fact, as if she were simply stating the truth of things: as if having taken stock of his bloodshot eyes and unkempt hair, the bluish veins spidering beneath his sun-starved skin, she is unmoved. He wouldn’t tolerate pity, not from anyone but maybe least of all from her, and she understands: the way things are now she would be tempted to bite his hand off at the wrist if he offered it in comfort.

His mournful eyes hold her, dark hollow stars that both beckon and repel and there was a time when she thought she could look into them and see all the way to his heart, but things are different now. He has hidden himself away, or maybe it is only that she has lost the ability to see.

“Is this what you wanted?”

_ This  _ being the throne; being everything he chose over her. Where before the thing was bracketed by an imposing canopy of chrome and carbon-black drawing the eye down to where Snoke held court, there’s nothing behind it now but the breathtaking expanse of grey sky. In the distance, brindled clouds hunker low above a barren horizon of dark crags, carved and whittled by the wind which even now drives the clouds at a frantic pace across the land. Below them the dim haze of what might generously be called  _ daylight _ betrays the presence of an atmosphere, a grey veil stretched thin above their heads to reveal the full splendour of the starry void beyond.

The destroyer is moored somewhere, then, and plainly it’s no ecumenopolis—from here to the horizon, as far as the eye can see, there’s nothing. No city, no fortress, not even another vessel, a king must have a kingdom and yet he’s the only living thing in all of it; he sits alone and broods in the dark aboard a ghost ship with the stars his only courtiers, the indifferent eyes of a billion silent galaxies the only witness to his ascendancy.

And in his face she sees the truth: none of this is what he wanted.

“You’ve won.” Rey tilts her head back to watch those galaxies spin. She could, in enough time, pick individual systems out of the immensity of it. She could find her way home out of the dark. “Is it what you hoped it would be?”

Has it brought you peace?

Does it ease your dreams?

There’s a part of her that has wanted to hurl these words at him every time the Force's connected them but like every time before she swallows them back, lets them wither in her throat and tells herself it’s because she already knows the answer.

Ghosts move through the air around her, unseen but sharply felt in the shiver that travels down her spine. The unquiet dead whisper in the darkest recesses of her mind.

It’s almost a relief when Ben’s voice pulls her from her thoughts.

“What do you want?” He sounds exhausted, and so, so sad. “Why are you here, Rey?”

Almost a relief. He knows as well as she does that they don’t get to choose when this happens. It is the will of the Force, and what can they do but bend to it?

Still. She’s a scruffy-knuckled scavenger brat from the Inner Rim. She can only bend so far.

She wishes she could do what he does, take the rage and the pain inside him and wield it, make it sharp and turn it back on the thing that hurts him. Find the root of all her suffering and make it suffer back.

Better that than endure this constant, frustrated  _ helplessness _ , the sense that little by little she is losing herself to something beyond her control. There’s a rage under her skin, so close to the surface she feels it like a muzzled beast in her chest; inside her a floodgate’s been opened and with no idea how to stem the tide all she can do is fight to stay afloat as the water rises, if she opens her mouth now she won’t be able to keep from screaming as her lungs fill up.

“I wanted you to choose differently. I don’t want anything, now.”

“You were the one that chose. You  _ left.” _

_ Me,  _ he would say, if he were less proud than he is vengeful.  _ You left  _ me _. _

“You didn’t give me a  _ choice.”  _ Gods, what she wouldn’t give to be back in her bunk, sound asleep with dawn still hours away, rather than standing here picking at scabs in her nightclothes.

“I did,” Ben insists. “What did you want, then? What more could I have offered, if the galaxy wasn’t enough?”

_ You _ —

Too close.

“Your _ help.” _

His head tilts to one side in that infuriating way she’s come to know: he regards her impassively. “You had that.”

Rey scoffs. “Yeah, until you decided you wanted me dead again. Whose TIEs were they that nearly shot us out of the sky? Whose gunships hounded us out of the Mid Rim?”

“I never wanted you dead.”

“Right.”

“I  _ didn’t.” _ His grip tightens on the throne’s armrests, fingers curling till it seems the leather will split over his knuckles. “I asked you to stay. I  _ pleaded  _ with you.”

“While  _ your guns _ were busy reducing my only friends to atoms! What the hell was I supposed to do, Ben?”

_ Tell me. _

_ Tell me what the right choice would’ve been _ .

A sigh shudders through him. Slumping back in his seat (she refuses point-blank to call it a throne) he lifts a hand to knead at his temples with forefinger and thumb, the very image of lordly weariness.

“We’ve had this conversation before.”

“More than once.”

The corner of his mouth twitches, the ghost of a smile. “My recurring nightmare.”

“I told you, you’re not dreaming. You just wish you were.”

Ben shrugs one broad shoulder as if to say,  _ maybe.  _ “But when I dream of you, I’d wish that you were real.”

_ Oh. _ The Force, which only moments ago had felt like a powder keg about to ignite, now simmers with a very different energy: there’s no answer she could possibly give that wouldn’t tip this febrile moment into something irretrievable and so Rey wraps her arms around her middle like a shield and holds the remaining distance between them.

Only then does she find her voice again.

“Why’s that?” She can’t help but snort at the thought that occurs to her. “Do we fight even more in your dreams?”

Judging by the look Ben gives her, such a possibility had never crossed his mind. It makes her smile a little more real when he purses his lips and with perfect, exasperated sincerity replies, “you are never less than the most difficult, stubborn, wilful, belligerent creature I have ever encountered.”

Rey has never been called  _ belligerent _ before. She isn’t even certain what it means, though it seems safe to assume it isn’t flattering.

She’ll wear it with pride.

“I’m glad to hear it.”

“But…in my dreams...” Ben hesitates, some searing truth caught on the edge of flight, and even in the grey gloom she can see the slow flush of colour across his cheeks. It suits him. “You are not you.”

_ Oh. Oh. _

Rey takes an unsteady breath.

“Funny,” she manages to sound light. “You’re always you, in mine.”

Another man might preen to hear it, and she turns away so she doesn’t have to witness the satisfaction on his face as her words feed his ego, or—worse still—the  _ relief _ .

Her eyes are drawn to the only other thing in the room: the silver oculus through which she had watched the Resistance ships burn. Its lens is open and she half-expects to see the remnants of the fleet there still, flames consuming them one by one while she’s frozen helpless where she stands.

She dreams of this sometimes, too.

“I am sorry, for that,” Ben says.

They’re alive, she tells herself. Safe.

“Why are you sorry?” Her voice is nearly a whisper.

“I think…” His throat moves as he swallows. His dark eyes follow when she begins to walk toward the instrument. “There are sweeter dreams you could have.”

Rey shrugs. “I didn’t say what happened, in those dreams.”

_ Too close. _

“What happens in yours?” she asks, she’s curious but it’s more of an effort to make him stop  _ staring at her _ the way he is now—the way he had in the forest, on the island, the way she’s never known what to do with. “Do we fight?”

“Sometimes.”

“Do I kill you?”

His lips part, a shaky breath escaping. “Sometimes.”

The darkness in her heart sings to imagine it.

“And the other times?” It’s hard to break the habit of a lifetime, the scavenger instinct that wants to work its nails into the cracks in his brittle skin and  _ pull _ until the soft precious parts spill out. “Do you kill me?”

“Once. I didn’t sleep for days after.”

She’s holding herself so tightly now she can feel her ribs between her fingers. She can’t count them by touch quite as easily as she used to, can’t map out the hardships of her youth in the notches where her bones press through, but the hunger that shaped her is never far from the surface.

“I’ve killed you, in my dreams,” she says, watching the clouds’ slow progress towards them across the sky. There’s a strange reddish tinge to them, as if they’re laden not with water but with blood. “Sometimes. Other times I stay with you, here. I stand by your side and—and I’m not me. I’m hard, and cold, and  _ wrong, _ like something in me broke and this is just...whatever’s left.” Quieter, as if she hopes he won’t hear: “sometimes you stay with me. And I think we’re happy.”

Once the words begin to fall it’s hard to catch them, each one pared out of her by the knife of having no other to whom she can say them; maybe this is just what comes of having another person in your mind, that you will be always and inexorably compelled to skin yourself alive for him.

“Sometimes I don’t recognise myself, but I know it’s what Luke feared I would become.”

Shame, thick and hot in her throat, at the memory of his disappointment—at the realisation that she had been measured and found wanting, insufficient in a way she hadn’t even realised she could fail.

That Skywalker, this man who didn’t even know her, had taken one look at her and deemed her inadequate.

_ You will never be enough. For anyone. Not even for the two people in the galaxy who should have loved you freely. _

Nothing on Jakku is free; even love comes at a cost.

If she was discarded, it was because there was nothing in her worth keeping.

The hurt of it threatens to rip her open all over again but Rey’s had a lifetime of practice holding herself together: she closes her fist around the pain and crushes it down, makes it small enough to bury deep inside where the light will never find it, dimly aware of movement in the corner of her vision as Ben rises to his feet and approaches her.

He’s only feet away when she again finds the courage to speak, though whether to him or to the indifferent void—who can say?

“I don’t ever want to be that person,” she admits lowly.

“You won’t,” Ben replies. “You couldn’t be.”

The quiet faith in his voice shakes her to the core.

“You don’t know that.”

“Neither do you. Unless you’ve seen something else?”

She hasn’t.

“Well, then.”

Gods, he’s insufferable. “Shut up,” she mutters, glowering out into the dark.

“As you like.”

On the other side of the viewport, it’s started to rain. Fat, heavy droplets shatter against the transparisteel, borne on the wind from the distant clouds to lash at the grounded ship, and a shiver travels down Rey’s spine when she notices the rivulets streaking the glass are an ominous shade of red.

“Blood rain,” she murmurs.

Ben has moved to stand beside her. “It does that, here. Something to do with algae in the lakes.”

“Huh.” Reaching out, Rey rests her palm flat against the glass. “It was dust, on Jakku. They called it blood, said it was an omen, but it was just dust.” She snorts, letting her hand trail down until it falls back to her side. “Everything was dust on Jakku.”

“An omen?”

“Mm. It’s supposed to foreshadow the annihilation, when it will rain for a year and a day and every living thing will drown, but afterwards the desert will be green again.” Her gaze drifts from the rainswept glass to the  _ Supremacy’s _ outer hull, the part of her that will never be anything but a junkrat mentally cataloguing each rivet and plate, every scrap of steel that might once have meant the difference between life and death.  _ This ship would have fed me for a lifetime and then some, _ she thinks. “Just a story.”

Stories, too, can be the difference between life and death; the one thing that keeps us from oblivion.

“An optimistic one, considering.”

“If you say so.”

“The world ends and life goes on. Out of blood, meadows: that isn’t hopeful to you?”

She’s never looked at it that way before. “I don’t think I ever saw past the blood.”

“Yet you hoped.”

“I deluded myself.”

“Semantics. What was the delusion, if not that your pain would be vindicated in the end?”

The cold is creeping up through her bare feet, toes curling into the stone.

“Is that the point of the story, then? That the truth doesn’t make for good stories?”

The truth: you were left. Unloved. Unwanted.

Who wouldn’t choose the lie over that?

“Truth can be its own burden,” Ben observes softly. “Rarely is it a comfort.”

_ You're nothing. _

“No shit.”

“But—” He chews over a thought: ruminates, she thinks is the word, though she couldn't tell you what a ruminant is or does, only that Ben does an excellent impression of one. “Without it, we are blind. Prisoners of our own ignorance. The truth is what sets us free.”

Once again it seems as though he speaks to someone she cannot see, that there’s someone else in the room with them and she is on the outside.

Or perhaps it’s himself he seeks to persuade.

“How is believing that different to a legend about blood rain and meadows?”

He has no answer for that, and after a moment she takes pity on him.

“Maybe it’s not that complicated. Maybe...we’ll believe whatever gets us through the night.”

It helps, at times, to imagine there is meaning to our pain: to tell ourselves that the hurt is necessary, that when we bleed we don't do so in vain. It doesn't make the hurt less, or put life back into those who’ve lost it, but perhaps it lets us sleep a little easier to believe they were not lost for nothing; that once the blood runs out something else will grow in its place, and maybe then it will be worth it in the end.

But—what if it isn’t?

What if none of this means anything?

_ What if we’re just hurting each other, and then one day we’ll die, and all we’ll have to show for any of it will be scars? _

Ben’s hair falls around his cheeks when he hangs his head, a hollow breath of mirthless laughter escaping him. “Even if it’s only that morning will come.”

Gods, she thinks. Say it like you mean it.

“That was almost profound.”

The glance he gives her is filled with uncertain amusement, like he’s trying to work out if she’s mocking him. Rey shrugs.

“I mean it. You'd fit right in on Jakku.”

Now he definitely thinks she's insulting him, but he seems too curious to take offence.

“It's true, then? The desert attracts mystics?”

“That’s...one word for them. I kept my distance, mostly. Not enough time in the day to go chasing fairytales in the wilderness.” Not that she wouldn’t have liked to, just once; there’s a dream that’s never really left her to one day make the journey out into the empty quarter, to see with her own eyes the valley where once a year, according to legend, flowers bloom out of the arid dirt.

The blue sea, they call it: the place where the heavens fell to earth.

It didn’t sound real, sound too impossibly romantic to exist in a world like Jakku, and yet—

“Joke’s on me,” she says bitterly. “I always thought they were mad for the way they went about, rambling about visions and prophecies and a magical Force, giving over their entire lives to blind faith. Turns out they weren’t far off the truth, and it was me believing a fantasy.”

The world beyond the glass is a dark, pink-streaked blur. The sky weeps.

“It’s not a crime,” Ben says, slowly, as if he isn’t all that certain. “Believing in something.”

“No. Just foolish.”

Just fifteen wasted years, and a life unlived. To a scavenger, for whom waste is an unconscionable sin, it might as well be murder.

The rain trailing in gory rivulets down the viewport casts watery shadows across his face.

There’s a fissure running through him, a fracture in his soul that never set; even his broad back cannot bear the weight of so many unhealed wounds and in the Force he’s more scar tissue than man, his body a patchwork ruin and bleeding between the cracks a light that burns like the sun. His eyes are stark, but when Rey presses at the bond he’s thinking of that child in the distant desert with the hollow, hungry face, skinny as the days before necessity made her strong, her wiry arms wrapped around her little self for warmth or the facsimile of affection. He’s thinking of her, and shame twists in her belly again but she fights the frantic impulse to gather this memory close and hide it away deep within, where it was before he exhumed it against her will into the light; fights the wave of inchoate terror that comes hand-in-hand with the thought of being  _ known _ and instead gives in to it just a little.

Just enough to make her want to climb out of her own skin and find something stronger in which to hide.

“Can we talk about something else?” Rey huffs, rubbing her arms to try and chase some warmth back into them.

“Such as?”

“I don’t know. Anything.”

“I could remark on the weather, but we’ve already—”

His gaze drops to her arm: the movement of her hands has drawn his attention, and it takes Rey a second to recall the leather strap she’d wound around her bicep to hide the scar there, a memento of the frenzied fight for their lives. She takes it off to sleep most nights; she was still undressing when the Force pulled them together. Her hand goes involuntarily to cover it as she avoids Ben’s eyes.

“It hurts?” Bemusement colours his voice. As well it might.

“No.”

“Oh.”

Rey hates that sound. “Don’t.”

“No, I...I see.”

“You don’t.”

“You’re ashamed.”

“I’m  _ not,” _ she grits out, rounding on him with a scowl, but when instead of the satisfaction she expects to face, Ben once again having reached inside her and plucked out weakness, she finds only quiet contemplation and maybe even a small measure of hurt, her irritation subsides. Lost in thought, he chews on his full lower lip, and after a moment seems to come to a decision: not without effort Rey drags her gaze from the ripe, bruised plushness of his mouth to watch, almost from outside herself, as Ben lifts one hand and—slowly, dark eyes darting up to hers like he’s afraid she’ll lunge and sink her teeth into his soft flesh—extends it toward her.

He hesitates—does he think she will reject him? Is it possible that he does not feel how her skin cries out to be touched, how her clenched hands ache for the want of holding?

_ Do it, _ whispers that insidious voice of need,  _ touch me. Show me I’m real. Show me this is more than a dream _ .

Why should it always be her that reaches first?

_ Please _ .  _ No one touches me _ .

_ Please _ .

In another life she gives breath to the words—she is braver, in this life, guards her heart less fiercely and perhaps even allows people near it; in this life hunger and loneliness have not taken root inside her and filled every space where love should be with thorns until the thought of touch has become anathema; in this life she is not made of stone.

We have hands so we can touch the world, so the world can touch us, but if in a small lifetime no one does then it’s easy to forget that. It was for more than protection from the merciless sun that Rey covered her skin, hid herself away so the world and all its noise and violence could never reach her, could never even get close. She grew to hate the very possibility of touch, to flinch from it as she would a naked flame; she buried her heart so deep beneath the sand that no one would ever find it, and no one ever did.

“I’m not ashamed,” she repeats.

The girl who shied away from touch died in a storm-lashed island half a galaxy away, perished in the fire of two hands meeting in the dark, and what took her place is what neither desert nor ocean nor the black void of space could kill.

 _Touch me_.

Ben’s fingers fumble with the closure, neither of them dare to breathe but his big hands are capable of surprising delicacy—more surprising to him than to her, she thinks, remembering the exquisite gentleness of his touch that first time beside the fire—and then it’s done, the leather falls away and now his thumb’s brushing lightly over the scarred skin beneath, such a small and oddly tender motion that Rey feels tears prickle in the corner of her eyes.

It’s too much—the quiet, focused intensity of him, the warmth that gathers at his fingertips and blooms into unbearable fire under her skin, the tentative glance of his knuckles over a long-healed wound as if he fears he somehow might still hurt her.

She would laugh, if she weren’t so close to weeping. A careless touch will never damage her, but despite a dozen languages jostling for space in her head in none of them she finds the words for how it affects her to be handled like something fragile, to be treated like she _matters_.

It might be her undoing.

Blindly she wraps a hand around her arm, close enough to the scar that her thumb could brush Ben’s if he moved it just a little lower.

 _Not fragile,_ the thought blossoms in the part of her mind that is him, made stronger by their closeness. _Precious_.

“Then why—” her voice cracks, splinters, her heart the same and it shouldn’t be possible to break what was never whole to begin with but here we are: here she is, choking back the tears clawing their way up her throat, arms curled around her body to keep it from crumbling.

 _Precious? No, not even close, just a stupid little girl who can’t stop needing,_ Ben had said as much himself and nothing’s changed since then.

Through the ragged, uneven sound of her own breathing, Rey hears her name spoken.

Memory assails her, of that night beside the fire, amid the hush of wind and flame that same low murmur promising her that she was not alone in the darkness, and at the recollection of that moment the splinter becomes a fissure that widens and widens, until the words are ripped out of her before she can catch them—

“Why didn’t they want me?”

_What did I do? What was wrong with me, that no one could love me?_

Whether it’s the plea or the pain behind it that finally breaks her, Rey can’t say. She feels herself crumple, bowing inward over the weight of grief that’s inside her and wants to get out, squeezing her eyes shut as the tears spill over but once they begin to flow there’s no stopping them, no holding back the onslaught of the tide that drags her under.

It hurts, it hurts so _much,_ and there’s no end to it, no possible point after which the hurt will stop.

She feels the air around her shift, the hand at her elbow pulling away before she’s enveloped in a sudden warmth.

By the time she realises it’s Ben, that he has gathered her awkwardly into his arms and is— _holding_ her, he’s gone.

She’s alone in her little bunk, the chill leaching into her and the sobs threatening to break her apart and this time there’s nothing to hold her together.

Her knees meet the ground, her body folding inwards. Her arms go around herself again but it's not enough.

It might never be enough again.

**Author's Note:**

> someone pay me by the semicolon
> 
> kisses to larissa and dot 💜💜


End file.
